New Scientist (Cambridge, England, Dec. 9) -- Your body may use melanin to “catch a tan,” but now the skin pigment has been repurposed – to make batteries. “This paper describes a really clever route to producing batteries out of biodegradable materials,” says John Rogers, a materials scientist at the U. of I. Although the current version isn’t fully biodegradable, it shows how batteries could one day be made to dissolve harmlessly in the body.